Vladimir Putin said he annexed Crimea and much of the Donbas region to “save” its Russophone population. The claim infuriates Volodymyr Rafeyenko, a distinguished Ukrainian novelist who was born in Russian-speaking Donetsk and who wrote and published entirely in Russian until ten years ago.
“It was an out and out lie, aimed at a western audience," Rafeyenko says aboht Putin’s comments. "My conscience began to hurt. I was 46 years old and didn’t know Ukrainian. I decided to learn it to a level where I could speak and write it.”
It is quite different. I don’t speak either, but when watching Servant of the People, I could pick up a lot of words in Russian, as they were similar to Slovenian. When they started speaking Ukrainian, I couldn’t understand anything. Even the show makes a plot point of this, when they invite the wrong Korea because the words for north and south are different.
I used to be fluent in Russian and I can understand both just as well.